In Apple’s OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) it was possible to use modifier keys to achieve finer increments of display brightness control for Apple displays. Sadly, that function was lost with the move to 10.7 (Lion). Now, in the latest Lion update (10.7.4) micro-adjustment has been reactivated.

Mac users are quickly adopting Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8), Apple’s latest operating system update for the Macintosh. It offers an array of new features, many of them improving feature parity to Apple’s iOS mobile operating system.

Digital Film Tools iOS App “Rays” is currently available as a free download. But even at its usual price of ninety nine cents, its a bargain. Rays is one of those “one trick pony” Apps, that does one thing, but does it well. Its one trick is to add convincing rays of light to your images.

Increasingly photographers are turning to iPads as an alternative to printing paper portfolios or showing proof prints. Images nearly jump off the high-quality display and the benefits in terms of flexibility are obvious and substantial. But the iPad doesn’t offer any way to calibrate or profile its display — meaning there isn’t any built-in way to ensure accurate color. This has left most of us mumbling vague apologies in advance when about to show off our latest creations on an iPad or iPhone.

No doubt the new iMacs will be the most attractive iMacs ever. And many serious imagers will be tempted to buy one as an imaging machine. Until it is possible to test the new iMacs it is impossible to be sure just how well they will function for such uses. But on first inspection, it appears that they may make a very good image editing system, at accessible price points.

More and more photographers are going without a copy of Photoshop, given its price tag of several hundred dollars. Many of these users are using the much more affordable, and for most photo tasks much more practical, Lightroom to organize and edit their images. There are also the users still working in iPhoto, but who have reached the point of wanting more advanced features than iPhoto offers.

Such users have the need to occasionally make localized edits, layered files, composited images, images with text added, and other such tasks not covered by Lightroom or iPhoto. Acorn is a very legitimate option for both these cases.

A week before the announcement of the new MacPro I had dinner with a videographer who was quite passionate about his need for a new MacPro, and what he needed it to contain. I warned him that the next generation would most likely not have a standard tower size or configuration, would likely offer Thunderbolt 2 as the expansion solution, instead of internal options, and would have excellent native graphics capabilities, though it might be some time before third party graphics options would be available. This was all clear from the general direction Apple has been moving in, and from the areas they have been showing interest in. That forms a fairly good description of the new MacPro in advance. And having that sense of the device in advance has allowed me to think less about the tech specs, and more about the concepts and applications of the machine, now that it has been announced.

This article describes how to create a WiFi network directly from a Mac with built-in WiFi. Such networks do not require a wireless router, and can be used to communicate directly between your Mac and your iPhone or iPad. This makes them ideal for using with the Datacolor SpyderGALLERY application, which requires WiFi between the iOS device you wish to calibrate, and the Mac that has the Spyder plugged into it. Once you know this trick you will use it for lots of other things, including moving files between your devices.

Mac users have been noticing that thumbnails of their images, in the Mac Finder, are not always showing correct color. Most commonly, this occurs when using a wide gamut working space, and results in very flat, and sometimes off-hue image color in the Finder preview of the image. I have received a number of questions about this, and while there I can’t offer a simple answer, I can provide some interesting information on the topic.